I'm sure many of you have found yourselves in the same boat as me: You need to know if a certain substring appears anywhere in a cell or group of cells.  You don't care where the substring is, just whether it's there or not.  You most likely would like to take action based on the result with an IF statement, right?

Unfortuantely, the built-in FIND function in Excel returns an Integer result, representing the placement of the starting character of the substring you searched for, rather than a boolean result.  That wouldn't be a deal breaker if there were a standard integer return value you could expect (and take action accordingly) if the substring isn't found (say -1).  Unfortunately, it doesn't even do that; you receive "#VALUE" if the substring isn't present in the search area.  If you're using a FIND function in a complex nested function, the entire nested function is broken.

There is a work-around in the form of the ISNUMBER function.  You can use this function to brute-force a boolean result:

=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("ABCD",A1)),"Yes","No")

This is clearly a shim & not at all elegant.

I do realize that the legacy FIND function needs to remain as-is in order to provide backwards compatibility, but I would very much like to see Microsoft introduce an alternative to the FIND function which returns a boolean result in a future version of Excel.